The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  Farhat didn’t point out that the camel-leader was about the same age as Gursoon. The two women had been friends for many years; it was chiefly this friendship that had led her to come with the seraglio into the desert, though she could have stayed with her dead husband’s family in Bessa. “Who else still needs waking?” she said instead.

  “Just Adiya and Imtisar, I think. The younger ones are all ready.” Gursoon pulled a face. “I’ll do Imtisar, shall I? She gets bad-tempered when she’s woken.”

  Farhat grimaced too. “You mean when she’s awake,” she said, and both women laughed.

  The camel-drivers made up for the lost time by driving the beasts into a lumbering trot whenever they were sure of their bearings, slowing only when the desert stretched emptily around them and Issi and Zeinab cast about for new landmarks. Before nightfall they found the ring of stones that they had been seeking, set up by earlier travellers to mark the route. The oasis would be another day’s journey directly to the south.

  “I remember it took us longer, though,” Zeinab said. “We had to travel through the night.”

  “I wouldn’t risk that,” said Issi. “We should camp here; we can’t risk losing the way now.”

  Their luck changed on the following day. Finding the stones had raised everyone’s spirits, but it seemed that no more markers had been left. They trudged across empty sand with only the sun and the fading line of their footprints behind to give them direction. The heat grew; some of the water-flasks were already empty, and no hills were yet in sight, but no one dared to think of stopping to rest.

  A little after noon an argument broke out between Zeinab and Issi when they spotted something in the sand a fair way to the east, a darkish smudge low down to the ground.

  “It can’t be a marker,” Issi insisted. “It’ll lead us off the route. I’m telling you, our way is directly north.”

  “But how long ago were either of us here?” Zeinab said. “Whatever that is, it doesn’t look natural. Someone left it there, and it could help to guide us.”

  “If it’s not a waterhole, I don’t care what it is,” the camel-leader growled. But there was no point quarrelling. They had passed no other landmark for an hour or more; even Issi was less certain of his way than he liked to show. Besides, the children were beginning to cry with thirst and tiredness. They agreed to put up tents, for no more than an hour, while a small group went to investigate.

  It was not a marker. Zeinab had gone ahead of the group, peering through the heat haze and the dry flurries of sand stirred up by the wind. They were almost at the thing when she stopped, staring. She said nothing as the others caught up with her.

  “So?” Gursoon demanded, puffing slightly at the back. “What is . . . Oh.”

  In times past, some of the more traditionalist sultans had done this, as a punishment for treachery, perhaps, or for some insult deemed unforgivable. Now, Gursoon would have said it was too barbaric for any but the worst of brigands.

  “But he’s just a boy!” someone muttered. “Look at him!”

  A young man—very young, it seemed, from his slight build—had been laid out in the sand, his outstretched hands and feet tied with ropes which were attached to four stout wooden stakes. His clothes were ripped; his bare face scorched by the sun to a mask of black and red. His eyes were closed, but he moved his head a little as they approached, and let out a faint sound that might have been a groan.

  “What do we do?” Fernoush whispered.

  “Do?” said Gursoon. “Cut him loose! He’s alive!”

  “No.” Zuleika laid a hand on her arm. “Think first, auntie. We have next to no water as it is, and the journey’s more than uncertain. We can’t afford to delay. And the boy is all but dead.”

  “Then he’ll die in what comfort we can give him,” Gursoon said. Her tone allowed no argument. Zuleika stared at her for a moment, then nodded once, and strode over to the prone figure.

  “This isn’t a boy,” she said. “It’s a woman.”

  Zeinab and Gursoon were already cutting the ropes that held her feet and hands. The young woman gave a single hoarse scream as her arms were released, than fell silent. Her eyes had opened, black-on-black in her burned face, but it seemed she had no more voice.

  Zuleika took the woman’s shoulders and Fernoush and Zeinab held a leg apiece. They carried her as gently as they could, but her face still twisted in pain from time to time, and her breathing hitched into ragged gasps with any unevenness of the ground.

  “Was it a marker?” demanded Issi as soon as they reached the camp. His face fell when he saw what they carried. But he offered no criticism, and set up one of the litters to pull the sick woman when they set off. They laid her down and gave her a little of the precious water, dribbling it into her mouth a drop at a time.

  “We should wait an hour longer,” said Gursoon, looking down at the woman’s ravaged face. “Her breathing’s a little easier. I think she may live, if she can rest in the shade awhile.”

  Both Issi and Zuleika started to protest. But it was the sick woman herself who answered. She stirred on her makeshift bed and murmured something.

  “What was that, child?” Gursoon bent closer. The voice was fainter than a whisper.

  “No . . . You go now.”

  “What’s that?” said Gursoon, startled. The young woman’s black gaze was fixed on her.

  “You set off now,” she croaked, her voice a hoarse whisper like the whisper of dust against stone. “At once. And when the mountains come in sight you turn a little to the west, as Issi remembers. Keep going. You find the water an hour after sunset.”

  Gursoon rocked back on her heels and stared down at her. After a moment, she said, “How can you know that?”

  The young woman’s mouth twitched in a fleeting grimace. “I know. Believe me.”

  “Who are you, girl?” Gursoon asked.

  Her eyes were closing as if she had exhausted herself, but the old woman caught one word in answer.

  “Rem.”

  The Fate of Those Who Search for Truth

  In many ways my life has been far longer than its actual span. The visions that beset me come from both before and after my time—and what I see is not always my own life. This has caused me much anxiety in the past. Often I can’t tell whose fate it is that I’m viewing, or even whether that fate is in the past or still to come. Only by focusing all my attention on a single situation or individual can I ever get what might be called a prediction—and those are partial, conditional and usually unwelcome. For reasons that may be apparent, I don’t tend to seek them out.

  So while I’m aware it sets me apart, my sight is no better as a guide to everyday living than anyone’s day-to-day experience: frequently unclear, and best made sense of with hindsight. Despite the promise made to me, I can’t see everything, or not in a way that does me any good. The two events that have most shaped my life were both unforeseen—or as near unforeseen as makes no difference—and both beyond my power to control. When I recall either of them, as I do often, it’s in a perpetual present. They will never leave me, never grow any less sharp in my mind.

  The first begins as a story. Some of it I remember only as a tale, told to a child before she slept. It was told with tears, as befits a tale of guilt and sorrow, but for all that it was the one I most often demanded, and I would not permit a word to be changed. As I repeat it now, my mother’s voice sounds in my head, by turns fierce with grief and tremulous with wonder.

  There was a woman named Rahdi, who had grown to mistrust her husband. She had married him for love, defying her parents to go with him—but once she had no home but his, she felt his fiery heart cool and his thoughts turn away from her. He became like any husband, eyeing other women in the market and sulking when his dinner was late. Even their little daughter failed to rouse his interest, once he had ascertained that the ch
ild was not a boy. And as time went on Rahdi became certain that he had taken a lover.

  She could prove nothing. Many husbands came home late; many left the house in their finest clothes and stayed out drinking with their friends. Alone with her sleeping child, Rahdi stared at the walls and remembered her father’s bitter words when she left his house, four years before: You think you know what you’re doing, girl. But no one knows all that’s to come. No one! She brooded on this, and when her husband came home silent and sulky, and turned from her in the night, she resolved that she would know, would know this one thing at least.

  On the day that her daughter turned four, Rahdi waited for her husband to leave the house. She took a great waterskin on her back and took the child by the hand, and went with her out of the town, into the desert. Years before, when she herself was a child, her grandmother had told her of a certain cave, within the desert hills some two days’ walk to the east. In that cave, her grandmother said, lived the djinni, who could grant gifts to those reckless enough to seek them. One who gained their favour might be rewarded with knowledge of hidden things, or of things to come. Of course, the old woman had added, they might curse you instead for your presumption; even kill you. Who knows the ways of the djinni?

  The little girl’s legs were short, and the journey took fully three days. The child never complained: she had not yet learned to speak in her four years, and she said nothing now. But Rahdi breathed a silent prayer of thanks when the hills loomed above them in the heat of the third day, and she saw the rock with its standing stones as her grandmother had described it to her, and heard the sound of water. She fed herself and the child, and filled their waterskin at the tiny spring. Then she followed the old woman’s directions to the djinni’s cave.

  The djinni were there. They came out at the dark opening to meet her: three of them, or four, or maybe more: their shapes flickered so that it was not easy to tell. One of them was like a tall woman with a light behind her veil instead of a face; another like a naked man with the head of a bull. Another was beaked, with white feathers pouring from its head, and another—or maybe it was one of these three—had eyes too large to belong to the face of man or beast, as flat and round as cooking-stones. The sight of them filled Rahdi with terror; she thrust the child behind her and fell on her face. But no fire fell from heaven to blast her; there was no sound at all, and after a moment she raised her head to see the creatures still shimmering before her, while her daughter stared at them with dark, unblinking eyes.

  Summoning her courage, she spoke to them, her voice sounding thin and faltering in her own ears.

  “May I find favour in your eyes, great ones. I have come here to beg for knowledge.”

  Nothing changed in the flickering faces, but one of the djinni now stood before the others and addressed Rahdi. Its form shifted as it spoke, so that the speaker was now the woman, now the bull-man, now the bird-thing, now some other, even less possible to describe, while the figures behind it took on others of the fleeting shapes.

  “The knowledge you seek will do you no good.” Its voice was many voices, harsh and sweet jarring together.

  Rahdi looked it in the face then, staring into the stony eyes. “And yet I ask it,” she said, and heard her voice grow stronger. “I cannot bear to live as I live now. I must know.”

  A sound like the cry of birds came from the djinni: Rahdi thought it might be laughter. The speaker opened a great curved beak.

  “Know?” it repeated. “Know what?”

  “Everything,” Rahdi said.

  The speaker of the djinni turned its head—now horned and black-pelted—to where the child stood silently watching. “What is her name?” it said.

  Rahdi was taken aback. She reached out to pull the child closer to her; but one did not refuse a djinn. “Rem,” she answered.

  The speaker nodded once, and the shadowy figures behind it nodded. “Good,” it said.

  And the child’s black eyes grew wider. For an instant her face writhed like the faces of the creatures before her. Then she threw back her head and howled.

  From that moment it is no longer a story: this is where memory begins.

  How can I describe it? I could say that all the words of the world rushed in on me at once. That happened, but more than that. There were voices too, a mad cacophony of them, and images. I saw a great army marching in the desert, and the sand at their feet red with blood. I saw the sultan’s palace, the servants with cups and heaped trays, the newest concubine weeping in a corner. And I saw houses taller than any house could be, palaces like monstrous stone tablets. A room filled wall-to-wall with books . . . a beggar woman shouting and waving a crutch in anger . . . a bearded man called Hakkim Mehdad, plotting war. Children gazing entranced at a box, which painted their faces with flickering light. My father, embracing a strange woman . . . The market near our home, with its stalls on fire and the merchants running in terror. All this in an instant, and at the same time the words pattering around me, telling, explaining. All the words. I had not known most of them even existed. Now they were mine.

  There was so much, and I could not put it away. At first I howled because I did not understand. Then I howled because I did.

  I scarcely felt my mother’s arms around me. She knelt with her face pressed against mine, shaking me with her cries which I could not hear. After a time she took my shoulders and stared appalled into my weeping eyes. Black. Black tears. Her own face was streaked with them.

  “What have you done?” she screamed at the djinni.

  “We have granted your wish,” the speaker said. “But we did not give the gift to you.”

  Rahdi shrieked curses at the shadowy figures, forgetting all her awe and terror. The speaker seemed to ignore them.

  “She will see,” it said, and now its form and voice were that of the veiled woman, calm and withdrawing. “She will understand, and remember, and record.”

  It turned its head to me, the white light shining for an instant through the veil and into my eyes. Was there pity in its voice, for that one instant?

  “All things will unveil themselves to her,” it said. “Except those which touch her most nearly.”

  And it was gone, all of them were gone. My mother and I faced a blank rock wall. We held each other in silence, as her shaking subsided and the black tears dried on our faces.

  And then? I had been marked, but there was no great destiny to take up; the world went on as before. Only my mother and I were changed. She talked to me as we journeyed back, and I replied. A few nights later we left my faithless father, taking with us his cashbox and all my clothes, and walked back to the town where my mother was born. Her own mother had died, but we stayed for a while with my grandfather; long enough for me to understand that my new gift was best viewed as an affliction, and to learn some of the skills of concealment. When he died, we travelled to Bessa, where my mother found a job at a pastry cook’s shop and I spent my days in the market, and discovered the written word. And so embarked on the path that would lead me here, into the desert.

  Was it all preordained? I can’t believe that. I foresaw this end, of course, but only as one of a hundred outcomes. Not all of them could happen to me: some, I think, will never happen because others took their place. In any case, once I learned some measure of control over my visions, I would never dwell on the uglier ones, preferring, like most people, to be soothed rather than disturbed. And how could I recognize that splayed, ravaged figure in the sand as myself?

  At the end of my trial Hakkim Mehdad had given me one look in which contempt was mixed with a kind of horror, before he turned away. “Let her die slowly,” he had said, his back turned. And so they led me out into the desert. We travelled for two days, away from the beaten tracks, Captain Ashraf of the Ascetic cult and two of his men. I went with them quietly—what else was there to do? The three men rode, and I walked behind Ashraf, ro
ped to his camel. It was the rule of the Cult to acknowledge no obstacle that was merely physical in nature, so we travelled through the heat of the day, halting only briefly when the sun was at its height. To give Ashraf his due, he rode slowly enough to save me from stumbling, and allowed me water and would not allow his men to rape me when we stopped for the night.

  None of them would speak to me, but I was able to distract myself as I walked with memories and imaginings. The books I had hidden were safe, I thought, and the others might yet be rescued. As for myself, I don’t think I really believed I would die then. There was so much else I had seen: my sense of a future was still strong. But that changed when the men stopped at the end of the second day, in the middle of a plain that had no end in any direction.

  “Here,” Ashraf said, and the men dismounted and took down wooden stakes and mallets from the backs of their two camels. At the sight, the terror I had kept back flooded over me like the bursting of a dam. I suppose my face whitened, and I began to shake. The men saw and laughed, but Ashraf’s face never moved. He directed his men to drive the stakes into the sand. When they threw me down I was too weak with fear to resist, and only tried to curl up on the ground like a child. They tied me hand and foot, I remember Ashraf’s look of distaste as he seized my legs to pull them out straight. One of the men tore off my scarf. The other ripped my robe with his sword and made to strip me, but the captain stopped him with a motion.

  “Leave her!” he said. He looked down on me with the same blend of contempt and horror that I had seen on the face of Hakkim Mehdad; then like his master, he turned away.

  I could not see them as they mounted and rode off. I don’t know if any of them looked back.

  The first pain is only from the ropes which cut into my wrists and ankles. I struggle, try to loosen them, but they hold me fast. Then the sun is directly in my eyes and I must close them, seeing the pulsing redness through my eyelids. The cramps begin then, first aching, then agonizing. It can’t get worse than this, I keep thinking, but it does. At some point I know that I am screaming. It’s dark now, the darkness pressing on me and no one to hear. The voices in my head are silent, for the first time in fifteen years; I can’t even call up the sense of them. Later the pain goes somewhere further off, my legs and shoulders are numb, and my mind too. It’s cold now, I begin to shiver, and then to shudder so violently that I think I will pull the stakes out of the ground, but they hold still. When the shuddering stops, for a while I don’t feel anything at all.